by R. G. Belsky
No one ever figured out exactly what she’d been doing before the fatal accident. Her parents said they’d long ago given up trying to monitor the movements of their wild, party-loving daughter. An empty liquor bottle was found in the backseat of the car, which led authorities to believe she was drinking in the vehicle either just before or even at the time she died.
At the high school graduation ceremony a few weeks later, her seat was left empty in her memory. The valedictorian mentioned her in his speech. And the commencement speaker said a prayer for her—with the students all joining in a moment of silence—before he sent the graduates out into the world with his words of optimism and encouragement.
That was pretty much all there was to the Patty Tagliarini story. The authorities officially closed the book on the case as an accidental drowning.
I remembered something the Munson Lake police chief had told me. About how the fence had been put up after another accident a long time ago. It must have been Patty Tagliarini’s accident. The fence was supposed to stop anyone else from going into the water the way she did. But, all these years later, someone had made sure Melissa Ross’s car got past the fence and crashed again into that same lake.
I looked down at the piece of paper where I’d been taking notes on what I’d read.
Then I wrote down the following points:
• Bob Wylie went out with Patty Tagliarini in high school.
• Melissa Ross died in the same lake—and in a similar way—as Tagliarini.
• Bob Wylie had been the top law enforcement official chasing Ross.
• What’s the connection?
CHAPTER 32
MELISSA Ross had grown up in Rockville Centre, on Long Island—a middle class community about an hour away from New York City. Her mother still lived there, in the same house.
I took the Long Island Rail Road out to Rockville Centre as soon as I got back to New York. Sylvia Ross, Melissa’s mother, didn’t look much like her daughter. She had unkempt hair, was plain-looking, and wore no makeup. She wasn’t that old, probably somewhere in her fifties. But she looked older. She looked worn out by life.
“When is the last time you heard from Melissa?” I asked.
“When she left the police force. After I heard about what happened, I called her. I offered to help her any way that I could.”
“What was her reaction?” I asked.
“She told me to go to hell.”
“Why would she do that?”
She shrugged. “Melissa had a lot of hostility toward people.”
“Especially men?”
“Yes.”
“Why was she mad at you?”
On the walls of the living room where we were sitting, there were several pictures of Melissa Ross growing up. One of them was of a little girl in pigtails on a tricycle. Another showed her blowing out the candles on a cake that said it was her tenth birthday. And one was of her in a cheerleader outfit from Rockville Centre High School. Sylvia Ross glanced over at that last picture now, gathering her thoughts before she spoke. I wondered if she was remembering the happy moments between her and her daughter. Or maybe they weren’t so happy after all.
“Melissa adored her father when she was growing up,” she said. “He took her to the park, showed her how to ride a bicycle, played catch with a baseball in the backyard, even climbed trees with her. I used to kid him about how he was turning her into a tomboy, not a little girl. They were so close.”
Her voice trailed off. She looked over at the picture of Melissa as a cute high school cheerleader again.
“When Melissa began to grow up, she . . . well, she began turning into a woman. A very attractive woman. And then I noticed that she and her father didn’t seem that close anymore. It almost seemed that Melissa didn’t even want to be around him. She’d become nervous, uncomfortable, whenever he came into the room.
“One day Melissa came to me. She said her father would come into her bedroom at night after I was asleep. Or during the day when I was at work. He’d come home from his job in the afternoon, before me, after she’d gotten out of school . . . and . . . do things. Sexual things. At first, Melissa didn’t understand why. Not really. She just told me that day, ‘Make him stop.’ ”
She bit her lip and looked like she was holding back tears.
“What did you do?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
She couldn’t hold back the tears now.
“I did nothing at all,” she sobbed. “I didn’t believe her. Or maybe I did believe her, but didn’t want to admit it. I told her she was making it all up. That her father would never do anything like that. I told her never to say anything like that to me—or anyone else—ever again.”
“Did you ask your husband about it?”
“No. I’m not really sure why I didn’t. I guess I just didn’t want to admit to myself something like that could really be true. It was easier to believe that Melissa was making things up.”
“What happened then?”
“Melissa ran away from home. I didn’t know where she was or what had happened to her for a very long time. Then I heard she was trying to make it as an actress or model in New York. And, after that, she eventually turned up on the police force. But she and I never really had much communication after she left home. She blamed me for what happened. Why not? I was as guilty as her father. Maybe more guilty. I could have done something to stop it, but I didn’t. I just stuck my head in the sand and pretended it wasn’t happening. I didn’t protect my daughter when she needed my protection. And she never forgave me for that.”
“And your husband? Are you sure it was true?”
She nodded.
“After Melissa left, I finally confronted him about what she said had happened. He admitted it. He even bragged about it. He said he didn’t see why messing around with her was such a big deal. It wasn’t like it was really incest, he said to me. I divorced him after that. So I lost my husband and my daughter. I’ve been alone ever since.”
“Where is your husband now?” I asked.
“He died. Cancer. A really nasty cancer. It hit his bones first, then his brain. They say he lived a long time with the pain before he finally died. I have to tell you, I was glad about that. About how much he suffered at the end. I always thought it was kind of God’s punishment for the terrible things he had done.”
“Your daughter’s body was found in a lake in Ohio,” I said. “Did she have any connection to Ohio? Did she know anyone in Ohio? Can you think of any reason at all that she would wind up in Ohio at the end?”
Sylvia Ross shook her head no.
“I’ve never been to Ohio in my life,” she said. “Neither had Melissa, as far as I know. Of course, I didn’t know that much about her life after she left here. But she never mentioned Ohio to me in the few conversations that we did have. I have no idea why her body was found there.”
I asked her questions for another half hour. But there wasn’t much more I found out until the end.
“You said something before I didn’t understand,” I said, looking down at the notes I’d made during our conversation. “About the time you confronted your husband over his sexual abuse of Melissa. You said he admitted it, but said it was no big deal because ‘it wasn’t really incest.’ What did he mean by that?”
“Well, I guess because he wasn’t Melissa’s biological father.”
“You mean you had Melissa with another man?”
She shook her head.
“I wanted to have a baby. But I couldn’t conceive. I tried everything. Fertility drugs. Egg implants. Nothing worked. The doctor said I couldn’t have a child of my own, so I . . .”
“Wasn’t Melissa’s biological mother?”
“That’s right. Melissa was adopted.”
* * *
There was no reason that any of this had any particular significance at this point, of course. Melissa Ross was no longer the killer we were looking for, she was just another victim. So what w
as I going to learn digging around in her past that could help me crack this case? I mean who really gave a damn about her adoption or her family or anything else about her? Looking at it logically, I was just wasting my time going after more information about Melissa Ross.
Except I’d also learned along the way during my journalistic career that information is the best tool a reporter has. And you never can be sure what’s important and what isn’t, even if you think you know. You can’t just collect the information you think will help you. You need to get all of the information, analyze it, and then see where it takes you. Sometimes that might be in an entirely different direction than where you began. So you follow that trail of information, no matter what. That’s why I tracked down the adoption agency that had turned over Melissa as a baby to the Ross family.
I had a bit of a problem obtaining the adoption information at first. The director of the adoption agency talked about the right to privacy of the families involved—and a lot of issues like that. But I had gotten permission from Mrs. Ross, and in the end, the director agreed she had the authority to track down the old files on the adoption.
“The biological mother gave birth on February 26, 1985,” she said when she finally found the file. She turned through the pages as she talked. “The child was put up for adoption in June of 1986, when she was one year old. The baby was transferred to our New York facility at that point. Arthur and Sylvia Ross began the adoption process soon after that—and they were given custody of the baby a few months later.”
“The baby was a year old?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Is that unusual? I assumed she would have been adopted as a baby. Why would the birth mother wait a year before beginning the adoption process?”
“The birth mother died when the little girl was a year old.”
“What about the father?”
“Dead too.”
“They died at the same time?”
She read through the file a bit more. “No, the mother died in a car accident. The father had been killed several months earlier. He was in the U.S. Army. Some kind of an explosive incident. The mother lived at home with her family. When she died too, the family decided they couldn’t raise a young child on their own—and that’s when they put her up for adoption.”
“You said earlier that the baby had been transferred here prior to the adoption by the Ross family. From where?”
“Ohio,” the adoption director said.
Damn.
“Where in Ohio?” I asked, even though I already knew what her answer was going to be.
“Some place called Munson Lake,” she said. “The birth mother drowned there in the car accident. Her name was . . . wait a minute . . . Oh, here it is. . . . Her name was Patty Tagliarini.”
CHAPTER 33
I WAS still mulling over my options on what to do next when I got to the office the next morning. I decided to talk to Marilyn about it. Even though I suspected she might be a tad upset with me. I had pretty much disappeared after the Munson Lake appearance, to go to Massillon and then Long Island without telling her or anyone else at the News. That shouldn’t be a big problem though, I told myself. Hell, she’ll probably be so glad to see me back that she’ll forget all about me going AWOL.
“Good morning,” I said to Zeena when I walked in.
“Don’t think so.”
“Don’t think what?”
“That it’s going to be a good morning.”
“Why not?”
“Marilyn wants to see you.”
“Great, because I want to see her too.”
“Don’t think so.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t think you’re going to want to see Marilyn this morning.”
“Why not?”
“She’s mad at you.”
“How mad?”
“Mad like in ‘Where in the hell is that damn Malloy?’ ”
“I’ll stick my head in her office right now, throw a little of my charm at her, and straighten everything out.”
“Don’t think so.”
“Will you stop saying that?”
I headed for Marilyn’s office.
“There’s nothing to worry about, Zeena. It’ll be fine.”
“Don’t think so,” she mumbled again under her breath as I walked away.
* * *
Marilyn was on the phone when I pushed open her door. I stuck my head in anyway, flashed her a big smile, and announced: “Been away, now I’m back!”
She glared at me, said something to whoever she was talking to on the phone, and then hung up. She did seem pretty mad. Of course, she didn’t have to be mad at me. Maybe she’d had a fight with her husband. Or one of her kids came home with a bad grade. Or her eggs were cold for breakfast. Something like that very easily could have been what had her in a bad mood today. It didn’t necessarily have to be about me.
“Where in the hell have you been?” she barked.
Nope, it was me.
“Working the Blonde Ice story.”
“Without keeping me or anyone else here in the loop?”
“There were some unexpected developments in Ohio.”
“So why not share them with the rest of us? Look, I’ve given you a ton of leeway on this story. I know you’ve been way out in front on it from the beginning. But there comes a point . . .”
“I found out some pretty blockbuster information, Marilyn.”
That stopped her.
“Should I call in Stacy and the other editors too so you can tell us?” she asked.
“No. This is very sensitive information. I’m not sure I can trust Stacy or anyone else with it.”
“Which means you think you can trust me?”
I shrugged.
“It’s kind of a sliding scale with editors,” I said.
“Okay, now you’ve really whetted my curiosity.”
I went through with Marilyn everything I’d found out about Bob Wylie. All about the strange links between him and the area in Ohio where Melissa Ross’s body had been discovered. And then how I’d found out about Melissa Ross being the daughter of the woman who died in the same spot thirty years earlier.
“What in the hell does all of this mean?” she asked when I was finished.
“I have no idea. But I’m a reporter. I go with my journalistic instincts. And my journalistic instincts right now tell me there’s a connection between what happened in Ohio with Wylie as a teenager in high school—and what’s happening now. I just don’t know what that connection is.”
Marilyn nodded.
“Let me ask you the obvious question. Do you think Wylie was the father of the baby? Melissa Ross’s father?”
“No, I checked that out. The father of the baby was a soldier who died in a basic training camp accident. He’d gone to school with the biological mother, Patty Tagliarini, at a different high school. Tagliarini transferred to Massillon after she had the baby. So Wylie didn’t even know her until after she gave birth to Melissa.”
“Could Bob Wylie have been involved in her death somehow?”
“Not according to the Munson Lake police. They say Tagliarini’s death was definitely an accident and she was the only person in that car.”
I took a deep breath and plunged ahead with the rest I needed to tell her.
“But there is more.”
“From back in Ohio when Wylie was growing up?”
“No, here in New York. Involving Houston. Wylie knew her when she was a prostitute.”
“Knew her how?”
“He was a client of hers, and they kept up the relationship for a period of time even after she left the business.”
Marilyn stared at me with a look of astonishment on her face.
“How do you know this?”
“Houston told me.”
“Do you believe her?”
“She has no reason to lie. She has this whole code about never revealing the identities of former clients. Tha
t’s why she never told anyone before. But now after Hammacher, the person closest to Wylie, was murdered—she thinks there has to be some sort of link between her relationship with Wylie and everything that’s been going on. I think she’s right.”
Marilyn thought about it all for a few seconds.
“I don’t think we have enough to print any of this yet,” she said.
“Agreed.”
“What we have are a lot of coincidences. A lot of speculation. This stuff could be dynamite politically for Wylie. But we still don’t know what any of it has to do with the woman—whoever she really is—that’s doing all the killing, including the death of Melissa Ross. We need more information, we need more hard facts.”
“More facts would be good.”
“So how do we get them?”
“I have a plan.”
“Let’s hear your plan.”
“You’re not gonna like it.”
“Now, why doesn’t that surprise me?”
“Okay, I could ask Bob Wylie about it.”
“You’re just going to walk into the office of the deputy mayor of New York City—who also happens to be the front-running mayoral candidate—and ask him if he knows why the body of Melissa Ross was dumped into a lake near where he went to high school? And what he thinks it might possibly have to do with a girl he briefly dated who turns out to be Melissa Ross’s mother—and died under similar circumstances back then? Then maybe casually throw in another question about him patronizing the most famous prostitute in New York City history who also happens to be the widow of the first Blonde Ice victim?”
“Not a good idea, huh?”
“I’d love to come up with a better one.”
“Me too.”
Marilyn thought about it for a while.
“When would you do this?” she asked.
“As soon as I can get access to Wylie.”
